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Thread: What I Saw

  1. #191
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    Skipjacks are interesting working boats. I had seen numerous pictures and line drawings over the years. When I saw the stern of one a few years ago, I was surprised. The transom looked like Alma.

    It never occurred to me that the working platform on the aft end of the boat was like a barge.

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  2. #192
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    Dura Mater and I wandered out of the bay yesterday, into the Golden Gate. We saw a number of boats, all singlehanded, doing the same thing, headed ... out there. Since there wasn't much wind we motored out just beyond Lands End, but then motored back in because there didn't seem to be much wind, and the water was lumpy glass. Here are Alan Hebert on Wildcat

    Name:  Hedgehog off Bonita 053020.JPG
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    and Todd Olsen on Waterwings

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    We arrived back in RYC harbor just in time for the wind to arrive. Big wind. Almost knocked me off her cabin top.
    Last edited by Philpott; 05-31-2020 at 04:04 PM. Reason: Bob identified sailboat; not Hedgehog

  3. #193
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    Sailing on Howard's Olson 911 today, what did we see? Lotsa sailboats at Angel Island and ... whaaaat? Boats tied up at Sam's, people eating on the deck.

  4. #194
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    Philippe's in town with Changabang at the Sugar Dock in Richmond. That's a powerful boat with lots of ... well, everything looked complicated. I delivered peanut butter cookies and helped with some complicated water transfers.

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    hehehe. We filled buckets with water and balanced them on the bowsprit to lift the stern up out of the water a bit.
    Last edited by Philpott; 06-16-2020 at 10:07 PM.

  5. #195
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    Default What I Read

    E.B White was an editor at The New Yorker Magazine, and the author of several children's books: Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. He was also a sailor. He wrote this essay in 1963. I don't know about you, but certainly it captures my own visceral response to sailing.

    WAKING OR SLEEPING, I dream of boats - usually of rather small boats under a slight press of sail. When I think how great a part of my life has been spent dreaming the hours away and how much of this total dream life has concerned small craft, I wonder about the state of my health, for I am told that it is not a good sign to be always voyaging into unreality, driven by imaginary breezes.

    I have noticed that most men, when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wandering, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the East that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or the drill begins to whine.

    If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. If it happens to be an auxiliary cruising boat, it is without question the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man - a home that is stable without being stationary, shaped less like a box than like a fish or a bird or a girl, and in which the homeowner can remove his daily affairs as far from shore as he has the nerve to take them, close-hauled or running free -parlor, bedroom, and bath, suspended and alive.

    Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove. Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope. It is small wonder that men hold boats in the secret place of their mind, almost from the cradle to the grave.

    Along with my dream of boats has gone the ownership of boats, a long succession of them upon the surface of the sea, many of them makeshift and crank. Since childhood I have managed to have some sort of sailing craft and to raise a sail in fear. Now, in my sixties, I still own a boat, still raise my sail in fear in answer to the summons of the unforgiving sea.

    Why does the sea attract me in the way it does: Whence comes this compulsion to hoist a sail, actually or in dream? My first encounter with the sea was a case of hate at first sight. I was taken, at the age of four, to a bathing beach in New Rochelle. Everything about the experience frightened and repelled me: the taste of salt in my mouth, the foul chill of the wooden bathhouse, the littered sand, the stench of the tide flats. I came away hating and fearing the sea. Later, I found that what I had feared and hated, I now feared and loved.

    I returned to the sea of necessity, because it would support a boat; and although I knew little of boats, I could not get them out of my thoughts. I became a pelagic boy. The sea became my unspoken challenge: the wind, the tide, the fog, the ledge, the bell, the gull that cried help, the never-ending threat and bluff of weather. Once having permitted the wind to enter the belly of my sail, I was not able to quit the helm; it was as though I had seized hold of a high-tension wire and could not let go.

    I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me. I did not want anyone else along. Lacking instruction, I invented ways of getting things done, and usually ended by doing them in a rather queer fashion, and so did not learn to sail properly, and still cannot sail well, although I have been at it all my life. I was twenty before I discovered that charts existed; all my navigating up to that time was done with the wariness and the ignorance of the early explorers. I was thirty before I learned to hang a coiled halyard on its cleat as it should be done. Until then I simply coiled it down on deck and dumped the coil.

    I was always in trouble and always returned, seeking more trouble. Sailing became a compulsion: there lay the boat, swinging to her mooring, there blew the wind; I had no choice but to go. My earliest boats were so small that when the wind failed, or when I failed, I could switch to manual control-I could paddle or row home. But then I graduated to boats that only the wind was strong enough to move. When I first dropped off my mooring in such a boat, I was an hour getting up the nerve to cast off the pennant. Even now, with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt, I still I feel a memorial chill on casting off, as the gulls jeer and the empty mainsail claps.

    Of late years, I have noticed that my sailing has increasingly become a compulsive activity rather than a source of pleasure. There lies the boat, there blows the morning breeze - it is a point of honor, now, to go. I am like an alcoholic who cannot put his bottle out of his life. With me, I cannot not sail. Yet I know well enough that I have lost touch with the wind and, in fact, do not like the wind any more. It jiggles me up, the wind does, and what I really love are windless days, when all is peace.

    There is a great question in my mind whether a man who is against wind should longer try to sail a boat. But this is an intellectual response - the old yearning is still in me, belonging to the past, to youth, and so I am torn between past and present, a common disease of later life.

    When does a man quit the sea? How dizzy, how bumbling must he be? Does he quit while he's ahead, or wait till he makes some major mistake, like falling overboard or being flattened by an accidental jibe? This past winter I spent hours arguing the question with myself. Finally, deciding that I had come to the end of the road, I wrote a note to the boatyard, putting my boat up for sale. I said I was "coming off the water." But as I typed the sentence, I doubted that I meant a word of it.

    If no buyer turns up, I know what will happen: I will instruct the yard to put her in again - "just till somebody comes along." And then there will be the old uneasiness, the old uncertainty, as the mild southeast breeze ruffles the cove, a gentle, steady, morning breeze, bringing the taint of the distant wet world, the smell that takes a man back to the very beginning of time, linking him to all that has gone before.

    There will lie the sloop, there will blow the wind, once more I will get under way. And as I reach across to the black can off the Point, dodging the trap buoys and toggles, the shags gathered on the ledge will note my passage. "There goes the old boy again," they will say. "One more rounding of his little Horn, one more conquest of his Roaring Forties." And with the tiller in my hand, I'll feel again the wind imparting life to a boat, will smell again the old menace, the one that imparts life to me: the cruel beauty of the salt world, the barnacle's tiny knives, the sharp spine of the urchin, the stinger of the sun jelly, the claw of the crab.

    E.B. White, 1963
    Last edited by Philpott; 06-17-2020 at 04:04 PM.

  6. #196
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    Quote Originally Posted by Philpott View Post
    WAKING OR SLEEPING, I dream of boats - usually of rather small boats under a slight press of sail. When I think how great a part of my life has been spent dreaming the hours away and how much of this total dream life has concerned small craft, I wonder about the state of my health, for I am told that it is not a good sign to be always voyaging into unreality, driven by imaginary breezes.
    E.B. White, 1963
    Philpot, I thought you had written that yourself, until I saw the notation at the bottom. I think it reflects the thoughts of every one of us on this forum. Whenever my wife says that the boat costs a lot of money for a small of sailing each week, I tell her that while I might only be on the water 8 hours a week, the other 160 hours I'm dreaming of sailing. The all in cost of 50 cents per hours is darned cheap for the wonderful life it has given us.

  7. #197
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    Oh, Foolish! For awhile there you thought me very erudite. I will change the attribution so no one is deceived. It is such a wonderful little essay I was compelled to share it.

    I received several private messages here and via email thanking me for posting E.B. White's comments. I read a bit further, and learned that his son, Joel, became a boat designer.

    http://sailingmagazine.net/article-1...is-family.html

  8. #198
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    Douglas Whynott wrote 'A Unit of Time A Unit of Water Joel White's Last Boat'. The book is a wonderful narrative including, EB White, Joel White, Steve White, the Brooklin Boatyard, and the surrounding community.

    Highly recommended.

    EB White 'Omit unnecessary words'. For me, only on slim occasions.

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  9. #199
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    "needless" (fewer letters)

  10. #200
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    Quote Originally Posted by BobJ View Post
    "needless" (fewer letters)
    You must have your copy of Strunk & White close by or memorized.

    Engineers were not allowed to buy the book.

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